Written by Thierry Gontier

Thierry Gontier is a Board Member of VoegelinView and Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Lyon Jean Moulin–Lyon III in France. He is author of several books, with the latest being "Voegelin: symboles du politique" (Michalon, 2008) and "Pietro Pomponazzi entre traditions et innovations" (B.R. Grüner, 2009).

The question of history is among the most important, but also the most complex, in the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. I am not certain that he ever formulated a united and definitive theory on this question. Since the 1930s, Voegelin had been recognized as a scholar in the history of ideas. His two volumes on the idea of race published…

As we review this work,[1] we must not forget the circumstances in which it was written: Sylvie Courtine-Denamy underwent arduous treatment for the cancer that took her life in October 2014, before she was…

The Primacy of Persons in Politics: Empiricism & Political Philosophy. John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke, eds. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013.

This work is presented as a tribute to Tilo Schabert, Emeritus Professor of Political Sciences at the University of Erlangen, well known for his work on François Mitterrand and the Mayor of Boston, Kevin White[1].…

To ask the question concerning "legitimacy of the modern age" represents an act characteristic of post-modernity, i.e. of a modernity which is suspicious of its own foundations. One of the recurrent forms of this question consists in asking whether the values proclaimed by modernity, the values of what we call "the Enlightenment" (secularism, the autonomy of reason, progress, political liberalism,…

In his book on Politics as Religions, Emilio Gentile credits Eric Voegelin with the invention of the concept of “political religions,” a concept that will be systematically used in the 1960s to describe totalitarian regimes.1 We know that Voegelin himself was not particularly attached to this expression, which he does not use in his published work after 1938.…